I think one of the great things about working
in the learning disability and mental health fields is that no matter how good
you are, or no matter how good you think you are, almost every day something
will happen that will reduce you back to the cretin that you really should be. It was almost impossible to teach Jimmy
anything and I mean simple life skills, like making a cup of tea or switching on
the telly. Would it have improved his
life if he had been able to do any of these things, I really don’t know. I spent an awful lot of time with his brother
listening to stories about Jimmy, seems that he liked old movies, Fred Astaire
type musicals and he liked big band music and sitting in a vehicle watching the
countryside roll by. Those could be
easily sorted for him.
Andrew was a different story altogether, he was
a survivor, so I began to spend time with him.
All of his teeth had been removed, I understand it is the high sugar
content of the medication they are usually given that rots the teeth so quickly,
plus poor diet, lack of hygiene and brutal ward staff. I noticed one day at the dining table that Andrews’s
teeth were horrendous. The teeth were perfect
but it looked like he was chewing mashed potato and this was just after
breakfast. Apart from having to ask a
fully grown man if he knew how to wash his teeth, how do you ask a fully grown
man if he knew how to wash his teeth? I
can remember him sitting there, smiling at me and shaking his head. Again I think these situations I treated as
matter of fact, Andrew did not know how to wash his teeth, so I would teach him,
if he wanted to learn. There was no
judgement call on my part, although I have to admit you would often like to get
your hands around the throats of some of the old staff who would have dealt
with him in the institutions.
Andrew seemed to want to learn to do more, he
wanted to learn basic cooking skills, and he wanted to wash the dishes. He had no understanding of basic hygiene and because
his lifestyle had the spectre of AIDs constantly looming in the background the staff
were not impressed, and so I had to buy a dishwasher so that after Andrew had
washed the dishes they could be boiled clean.
I was determined to try and get him dressed appropriately in clothes
that fitted him and that were suitable for his age and body. I took him to a shop in Liverpool, T J Hughes,
quite a well-known store. I always found
it interesting how you would always place yourself between whoever you were
with and members of the public, I don’t know who you were protecting more, but
it was obvious that you were always on edge, always expecting violence.
We moved on to an escalator and went to the
second floor where I attempted to buy him some new shirts. Andrew couldn’t make up his mind so we ended
up buying him some new bed linen. It was
a start, he was learning how to do things for himself, he was out in public, and
he was with me, what could go wrong?
Well, when we came back to the escalator Andrew refused to get on
it. I leapt on the escalator and as I
began to descend smiled and held out my hand asking him to follow me; I didn’t want
to make a big thing of it. Apart from
being terrified of the escalator, which he had calmly come up on, he now
thought I was leaving him alone in this massive shop and began to panic.
He wasn’t the only one panicking as I tried to
fight my way up the down escalator with bag laden shoppers, unaware of Andrew skipping
from foot to foot behind them, tutting their little hearts out at me as I tried
to squeeze past them. Some shoppers were
stood standing watching Andrew go in to mild meltdown, but as I reached the
floor he began to punch himself and it sure felt like every shopper was now
watching. This is the time you realise that
you have not done a course that has covered this situation, but you must deal
with it, because if you didn’t, very soon T J Hughes was going to have a Tasmanian
Devil running about its second floor and there wasn’t even a sale on.
First of all I grabbed Andrew, in a great big
bear hug, pinning his arms by his sides so that he couldn’t hit himself
anymore. I then made straight for a fire
escape and smashed through the doors. It
was nice and cool out on the staircase, which was an internal staircase. Andrew was pacing about but appeared to be calming
down. Two or three staff members came
and I assured them that we were fine, I apologised for any fright we may have
given them and then asked permission to use the staircase, which we did and
left the building. I tried to get Andrew
to explain to me how he had managed to use the escalator to go up but was
terrified of it going down. He was
unable to explain it to me so I left it, far too deep for me to explore.
I think, or at least I hope, the staff started
to fall in to line behind me as they knew I was a ‘can do’ sort of fellow. My team was still short two members and I
kept asking Joe when I could have two new members of staff. Joe was always extremely busy, apart from one
afternoon a month when he would come around to complete my assessment. This was one of Richard’s ideas where we were
always trying to improve ourselves. Joe asked me what I thought of NWCS and I can remember telling him that I loved it
so much I was going to get a big tattoo of the company name and crest on my
forearm. The reason I remember saying this
is that the following month he checked his notes, and asked me if I had got my
tattoo yet. It was a waste of time and a
pain in the arse, but ours is not to reason why I suppose.
I really could see nothing in Richard’s
personality that made him stand out as a leader. He was a typical stereotypical accountant. He would always come in to meetings with an
apple, which he never ate, but one day he did, which I found rather
strange. If I was chairing a meeting I
would never eat an apple, or anything, once the meeting had started, but Garry
was having a go at one of the female team leaders. Something had happened and he was giving her
a telling off in front of everyone. I
felt that Richard was eating the apple, thus allowing Garry to speak, but by
being there he was actually reinforcing Garry’s position. To me this was bullying and there’s nothing I
hate more than theft or social workers, than bullying. The girl was holding herself together well,
but it was quite apparent that she was shaken.
I could see that some others were taken aback and now began to feel that
the drama was a lesson for us all. I
immediately stood up and told him to stop.
I didn’t ask him to stop, or suggest that he might stop, I told him to
stop and in the back of my mind I kept telling myself not to swear.
It was Richard who gave the nod to Garry, who
sat down and I knew that he had been behind the whole thing. He was going down in my estimation and going
down very quickly. As an Irishman who is
ten times more better looking than most others on the planet, and the best
looking member of British MENSA I feel
it is my duty to help people. Richard,
probably not in MENSA, seemed to want to tell everyone how good he thought he
was, which to me was a weakness, but explained why he religiously followed
policy and procedure. One day he
introduced us to a management technique where we could assess every manager for
a specific task. He was in his element
talking about Core Team Members, Matrix Management, and Situational Leadership. This would allow any manager to put the
perfect person in the correct position and contribute to a successful management
project.
In the forces I was used to whoever was in charge
coming in and saying, “You will do this, you will go there, you will do that.” Real, practical and positive, management. I could imagine twenty six of us, middle of
the night, standing in a white out, half way up a mountain with Jack saying, “Hold
on chaps, I think I’ll just complete a matrix management plan to determine who
does what.” I had many names for what
Richard did, horseshit being the most common, but I settled for the fact that
he was doing nothing more than getting us involved in some sort of Victorian
parlour game. I wasn’t the sort of
person who believed what people said and did spend a lot of time in libraries
so looked up Richard’s Management Matrix to discover that it could be used
once. That because people changed,
within themselves, the matrix had to be carried out every time you were given a
new project. Unlike Jan who had turned herself
from a social worker into a brilliant and inspirational leader, Richard seemed
to be heading in the other direction.
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